Double-replica theory for evolution of genotype-phenotype interrelationship

TL;DR

This paper develops a statistical physics model using replica theory to understand the co-evolution of genotypes and phenotypes, revealing phase behaviors and trade-offs relevant to biological robustness and evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a novel replica-based framework for modeling genotype-phenotype evolution, extending spin-glass theory to include coupled genotype-phenotype dynamics.

Findings

Identification of a robust phase at intermediate noise levels.

Discovery of a trade-off between fitness and genetic robustness.

Dependence of evolution dynamics on the ratio of target to non-target spins.

Abstract

The relationship between genotype and phenotype plays a crucial role in determining the function and robustness of biological systems. Here the evolution progresses through the change in genotype, whereas the selection is based on the phenotype, and genotype-phenotype relation also evolves. Theory for such phenotypic evolution remains poorly-developed, in contrast to evolution under the fitness landscape determined by genotypes. Here we provide statistical-physics formulation of this problem by introducing replicas for genotype and phenotype. We apply it to an evolution model, in which phenotypes are given by spin configurations; genotypes are interaction matrix for spins to give the Hamiltonian, and the fitness depends only on the configuration of a subset of spins called target. We describe the interplay between the genetic variations and phenotypic variances by noise in this model by our new approach that extends the replica theory for spin-glasses to include spin-replica for phenotypes and coupling-replica for genotypes. Within this framework we obtain a phase diagram of the evolved phenotypes against the noise and selection pressure, where each phase is distinguished by the fitness and overlaps for genotypes and phenotypes. Among the phases, robust fitted phase, relevant to biological evolution, is achieved under the intermediate level of noise (temperature), where robustness to noise and to genetic mutation are correlated, as a result of replica symmetry. We also find a trade-off between maintaining a high fitness level of phenotype and acquiring a robust pattern of genes as well as the dependence of this trade-off on the ratio between the size of the functional (target) part to that of the remaining non-functional (non-target) one. The selection pressure needed to achieve high fitness increases with the fraction of target spins.